12 June 2000 ER WG Telecon

Summary of action items and resolutions

Consensus: we will focus on tools that evaluate content rather than
tools that evaluate tools.

Action: WC take to AU: we're looking at content. we're going to develop
a test suite to evaluate content. This will help AU tools evaluate ATAG
checkpoints that apply to WCAG content. If you want to include ATAG tests
in the test suites, then AU needs to do that work.

Action WC send notes to people with open action items.

Action DB: Forward info about the FrontPage Accessibility Wizard to ER.
Get more info.

Action: everyone to comment before next meeting.

Action: WC add test suite to deliverables.

Resolution: Replace the "example language" sections in AERT with link to
a tool (as an example) or to text with in WCAG (rationale).

Action WC: propose to CG that ER meets with AU, UA, and WCAG on a
monthly rotation such that ER has one joint meeting per month and 3 solo
meetings.

Action WC, CR, MC, BM think more about how to save state information
during an evaluation session. Put on the agenda for the 17 July
meeting.

Action:CMN ask the internationalization interest group about readability
indicies in other languages, e.g. Fog Index or style/grammar
checkers.

Action:GR ask people who do mathematics on the web to find out
combinations of elements that would trigger that this is a math equation
or logic expression.

Action:DD continue exploring OCR field that can do anything to recognize
that there is text.

Action:WC add HTML MAP technique for grouping links to AERT.

Action:WC add Daniel PICS WCAG conformance scheme to Errata for
WCAG.

Action:CS ask the necessary folks at Microsoft if the plug-ins could be
made available in more obvious space.

Action:WC link to MS powertoys (from list of existing tools).

Action:MC make the browser support info from bobby available.

Action:?? figure out how to present that info in a usable way.

Action:GR send e-mail to CS about UAs not showing text of client-side
image maps even if alt is defined.

Participants

William Loughborough

Harvey Bingham

Wendy Chisholm

Chris Ridpath

Dick Brown

Michael Cooper

Brian Matheny

Regrets

Len Kasday

Gregory Rosmaita

Action items

WC I had an action item from the joint AU/ER meeting: WC take idea of other
types of evaluation tools for ER. What exactly do we mean by evaluation? Does
it include evaluation of tools or limited to evaluation of content?

CR our work is based on WCAG and therefore on content and not on tools.

WC CMN made an interesting point that if AU and UA become the interest
groups for ER WG, that the division between the groups seems to be: "IGs"
create normative guidelines, ER creates tools and documents techniques.
therefore if an "IG" needs a tool they come to us.

WL Putting a tool on our list is an evaluation?

CR we put it there but not evaluating it.

WL we're not putting an evaluation in any other way.

DB Not sure we should evaluate tools. Not sure what we would base our
measures on.

WL conformance testing. We are publishing reports on authoring tools.

DB that's how it conforms to AU guidelines.

WL The only tools that we could evaluate on this list are tools that are
evaluators of themselves.

Consensus: we will focus on tools that evaluate content rather than tools
that evaluate tools.

HB valuable to annotate each of the tools as we have done.

WL We're evaluating but not rating.

CR if we're just looking at content, we do look at tools. Where does Bobby
fit in? It's not an authoring tool but it's evaluation.

WL It's on our list.

WC combining tool list with AU. therefore, bobby included in with
those.

WL The question on the table is do we evaluate tools.

MC I like the idea of tool developers evaluating their own tools. If we
have a set of test pages for people to run the pages against, that will add
consistency across the evaluations.

HB We add to the suite of tests.

WL That in itself is a tool.

MC That is another representation of the AERT guidelines. We describe, this
is what a tool should do and if done correctly this is what the result of the
test suite should be.

HB Then anyone who has built a tool could contribute their test suites.

WC Are we suggesting that we will build a test suite? If so, does it
include AU stuff?

MB For AERT we are dealing with an HTML page, ATAG goes beyond that.

HB If in evaluating a document, if we could identify what tool was used to
produce it, we could report that in the evaluation of the page.

MC We've discussed that recently. The reason for doing it is that if you
discover that tool X generates alt-text incorrectly in one way, you could
easily search for tool generated problems.

HB also an AU issue.

WL Perhaps a Priority 3 guideline in WCAG to identify what tool you use to
produce.

HB However evaluation tools may strip that and insert that they
created.

WC Variety of ways that they can include who created it. META, comment, or
DOCTYPE.

Action: WC take to AU: we're looking at content. we're going to develop a
test suite to evaluate content. This will help AU tools evaluate ATAG
checkpoints that apply to WCAG content. If you want to include ATAG tests in
the test suites, then AU needs to do that work.

MC Reason we use test pages rather than URIs is that URIs might get fixed
and then we'll lose our test.

WL Does Bobby use something like that?

MC in theory, yes still working on.

Action items from face2face

WC 21 action items! Many people are not here.

Action WC send notes to people with open action items.

WC accessibility wizard in FrontPage. Dick?

DB Recently seen e-mail, will forward some info on the ER. Been bouncing
around for a while.

Action DB: Forward info about the FrontPage Accessibility Wizard to ER. Get
more info.

Charter

Action: everyone to comment before next meeting.

Action: WC add test suite to deliverables.

Relationship with AU

WC reads from charter.

HB naive to think that we'll describe all of the algorithms that will be
used. What we describe are those that demonstrate what can be done not all the
possibilities.

/* silence. people want to look at off-line */

ATAG-TECHS and AERT harmonization

WC Want to point to a concrete example of how we might do this.

CR Example language is helpful.

WC Don't see how we're going to do this.

WL We're the examples for their techniques. Example language could just be
example tools.

WC What if we point to tools and say, here's what they say, or if we point
to WCAG and say here's the rationale.

Resolution: Replace the "example language" sections in AERT with link to a
tool (as an example) or to text with in WCAG (rationale).

Relationship with WCAG?

CR we're setting up a relationship with AU, should we also set up one with
WCAG? It seems very important for us to be involved in the work on WCAG
2.0